Any blog has to start somewhere and new starts, however exciting, require an effort. And in this instance, we are talking about our children, our most precious, so this is even more difficult as many emotions come into play. But still, let’s start somewhere. Let’s start from the origins of this Network.

Since our child was very small, we started noticing behavioural patterns and other hints which raised our attention. We regularly talked about it with our pediatrician, in the regular check-ups. We and our pediatrician, as well as the nursery teachers, were very cool about it, but at the same time we all kept an eye on it, because it looked…peculiar. At a certain moment, the pediatrician advised us to skip a school year, but we were not convinced about this solution. He had just started primary school, and we engaged in a close dialogue with the class teacher. We progressively matured the awareness that we did not have all the pieces of the puzzle and that we needed to understand better.

Two words started to be mentioned more and more frequently: high potential. It was something new and a bit mysterious for us and we approached it with caution. In the culture where we come from (Italian, from the ‘80s) we never heard about serious research in this area. High potential, IQ tests suggested smart kids, and these have always existed: these kids which were excellent at school, good for them and for the parents, sometimes the teachers tried to propose some additional exercises so that they would not feel bored in class, and that was it.

But smartness and bright results did not cover the full picture for our particular case, i.e. our child. We also felt that we needed to be very cautious, as we did not want to rely on pseudo-science; this would simply not be us, we needed strong scientific basis. We started doing research online, we filtered out what had not been published and peer-reviewed, and we discovered a world. Scientific research by reliable institutes, articles, blogs and much more. We still felt disoriented, but progressively we matured the awareness that we needed to have our child tested.

Ok, but by whom? And what kind of tests should he undergo?

We realized that we did not know where to start. Our pediatrician gave us the contacts of a French-speaking neuropsychologist. Good, so we need a neuropsychologist. We searched further and we understood that it would have been best to have the child tested in his strongest language, Italian in our case. Hmmm, not so easy to find one in Brussels. A quick search on the web did not give many results. We considered some test centres in Italy, one of them seemed well equipped and foresaw the possibility, for families coming from abroad, to do all the tests in one go. Still it did not sound as an ideal solution for us to be far away from that centre, in case we needed any further meeting.

We checked one by one all the Brussels psychologist clinics where there seemed to be an Italian-speaking psychologist, looking for a neuropsychologist which contemplated neurodiversity or high potential among the specialties. We also checked the list of psychologists published on the website of our consular office. Let’s be honest, it took us weeks.

After several e-mail exchanges and some dead ends, we ended up with two names. But both neuropsychologists were fully booked, so we were put on a waiting list. The school year ended and a new one started. We remained in touch with one of the neuropsychologist and we eventually managed to find a possible slot in autumn 2024 for undergoing the test process: a first meeting with the parents only, a second meeting where the child undergoes the test. Then a meeting with the parents only to present and discuss the results. The assessment was done through a WISC-IV, which is the Wechler test for our child’s age range.

Around one week after the test, we parents met with the neuropsychologist who presented us the results: the IQ in numerical terms, what it meant, the full details of the results.

The answers we were looking for were there, black on white. Our child was indeed a high potential child, also called gifted child. We cannot say that it was a “Eureka” moment, the signs had already been there for years. Rather, it was a relief, as it gave us a basis to understand our child. We were very aware that this assessment was only a starting point for a long journey, for us as parents, for our child, and for us as a family.

We then started a dialogue with the school, not only with the teacher, but also with the school management in order for them to apply the policies of the European Schools for gifted children. We did a lot of research on the web, and we learned a lot about high potential/giftedness which gave us more insight in the complexity of gifted children.

We searched for organisations in Brussels and in Belgium for the families of gifted children. And we realized that there was very much on the web about giftedness, and very little in Brussels, in our work environment and in the European School’s environment, also in terms of understanding and support.

It was a year full of emotions, of acceptance and compassion, of learning and advocacy, and often of frustration. But we are determined to do whatever we can for the wellbeing of our children. And we realise that there must be other parents in our school who have been or will go through it – this is purely statistical. We don’t want to be alone in this, and we don’t want that any family feels alone facing the joys and the challenges of having a gifted child. Little by little, during this year, we have developed the decision that we want to make it bigger that just us.  We want to be in contact with other families of gifted children, we want to share our experience and our resources, we want to shape the reality around us.

This is why and how we decided to create the EEB2 Network for Gifted Children’s Families.

A hub for knowledge sharing, a group of mutual support, to share resources and experiences, for parents to collaborate and advocate together for appropriate support, and for children to find their “tribe”. We all want the best for our children and this group ultimately aims at better supporting HP/gifted children in having their needs fulfilled at school and outside.

We hope that you will join us in making this Network a point of reference for all the families of gifted childred on EEB2. For our own children and for all the gifted children in our school and their families.

And you, what was your experience with your gifted child? Feel free to share at giftedchildren.eeb2@gmail.com